1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for compressing/decompressing data using floating points.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following descriptions do not constitute the related art and provides only background information related to embodiments of the present invention.
Referring to FIG. 1, a floating point method represents data in the form of a sign, an exponent section, and a mantissa section. To design a data compressor based on a method of compressing data using floating points, the number of bits in the exponent section has to be large enough to sufficiently represent the size of input to the compressor for data loss minimization, and the number of bits allocated to the mantissa section has to be sufficient to represent significant digits of actual data.
If the number of bits in the exponent section is insufficient, bit saturation occurs during a compression process and thus data is seriously distorted. Accordingly, the number of bits in the mantissa section is generally reduced in order to increase the compression ratio. However, since accuracy of the significant digits is proportional to the number of bits in the mantissa section, it is difficult to prevent data loss.